COMET as a justification for using Node.js?
A lot of excitement is circulating around Node.js. To an extent this strikes me as symptomatic of a pattern in internet software development where a flashy new idea comes along, a bunch of leading edge thinkers get excited and start using and promoting it, there's a wave of excitement, and a call to rewrite everything under the sun using this new bit of flashy technology. But is the reinvestment of rewriting everything using that new piece of technology worth the result? That is, will Node.js be the death of LAMP? Who knows about whether the excitement around Node.js will lead to that result, but in researching and evaluating Node.js I've come across a specific use case that directly calls for server architecture identical with Node.js. There's an exciting class of web applications which use asynchronous browser updates to increase interactivity, that as we'll see in a minute require an event driven server architecture which seems well suited to Node.js. Leaving aside the question of a general purpose Node.js based server stack, let's look at COMET style applications.

You may need to write a bash shell script that accesses data stored alongside the script, while your current working directory might be elsewhere. In my case the shell script needed to use Node.js scripts stored next to the shell scripts -- the shell script acting to simplify running the Node.js scripts. The "data" to be accessed in this case is the Node.js scripts, plus the support modules required to run them. You may have other data like a list of hostnames or who-knows-what.